SSRP Abstract

Board 9: Do Female House Wrens (Troglodytes aedon) Have Personalities?

Student Scientist: Zoë Swanson ’24
Research Mentor: Dustin Reichard (OWU Department of Biological Sciences)

Humans have distinct personalities that allow us to predict how someone will react to a new situation. Do other animals also have personalities and behave in predictable ways? Our study examines this question by presenting house wrens, a small songbird, with a fake predator and a novel object that they have never seen before, to test their aggression and boldness. Much like in humans, we predict that a more aggressive wren in response to the predator should be bolder in response to the strange object. Such similarities between the wren’s reactions, would support a personality.

Personalities that result in consistent, individual differences in behavior are not restricted to humans, but instead extend across the animal kingdom. We tested whether house wrens (Troglodytes aedon), a cavity-nesting songbird, exhibit personalities by measuring their aggressive response to a model of a common nest predator, the black rat snake (Pantherophis alleghaniensis), and their boldness in response to a novel object that the female wrens have never encountered. Each stimulus was placed on top of the nest box for seven minutes and the behavior of the female was recorded. We predicted that if house wrens have personalities, a more aggressive response to a nest predator will correlate with a bolder response to a novel object at the nest box. We found that aggressive and bold behaviors had a positive correlation, which is consistent with our hypothesis that house wrens have personalities just like other animals across the taxonomic spectrum.